Organizational diagnosis through professional listening

Helping companies stay human in the age of AI.

We diagnose the health of your organization and hand your team a way forward it can see, hear, and believe. Our method: professional listening, with hope as the signal.

The thesis

Measure what hope moves.

Hope functions as a signal. Nobody needs hope when everything works; hope appears where something broke and people still believe in the fix. So every pocket of hope in your organization marks an opportunity: untapped capacity in a person, a fixable fault in a system, a team ready to move the moment someone clears the path.

Hope also looks forward. It points at a future worth working toward, which makes it the raw material of strategy: no one builds a strategy without believing in a future. So we listen for hope, we measure what it moves, and we help you harness it.

Walk Score changed how people choose neighborhoods. Gross National Happiness changed how a nation measures itself. We built the equivalent for organizations: a hope indexname pending that tells you how much your people believe in your future, and a diagnosis that tells you why.

Creativity

More options under pressure.

Innovation

Smarter risks, taken sooner.

Resiliency

Faster recovery from setbacks.

Communication

The truth, told sooner.

Strategy

Execution with fewer stalls.

Proof

We have done this work at the largest scale.

First place

Where a Microsoft division's employee Thrive scores ranked across all of Microsoft Cloud after our culture program. They started in the bottom 25%.

$20B

The company we repositioned for its NASDAQ debut. Ticketmaster still uses that brand identity two decades later.

30 to 40

Interviews per listening tour, conducted across five separate Microsoft organizations.

20 years

Of ethnographic research inside Google, Disney, PlayStation, Meta, and TikTok.

The lineage runs back to Southwest Airlines, where we both started our careers and learned the principle that guides every engagement since: people support what they help to create.

The flagship deliverable

A diagnosis you can watch.

Insight teams put customers on film decades ago, and those videos still move nine-figure decisions inside the world's biggest companies. Employees got the other kind of camera: the recruiting promo, the ping pong table, the wave at the lens. Nobody films the truth of an organization for the organization itself. We do.

We run your listening tour on camera, then weave your people's voices into a short, honest, strategic film: the complicated knot named plainly, the wins and the hope captured in your people's own words, a flag in the ground for the way forward. Your team gets seen and heard in the same moment. Leadership gets a diagnosis it can feel. And the supercut of everything people love about working with you becomes the recruiting film you could never script.

Diagnose.

Something feels wrong and nobody can name it. We listen across the organization, then bring the obstacles and the glimmers of possibility to life for senior leadership, without making a villain of anyone.

Realign.

The strategy moved and the story lagged. We piece your narrative together through your people's own voices, so the team hears the vision from itself.

Observe.

Some truths never surface in an interview. We watch how work actually happens: how meetings flow, where decisions stall, what the space itself says. Investigative ethnography, on film.

What you receive
Essence cutForty-five seconds of what your people love. Runs at all-hands, on your careers page, in the boardroom.
Working cutAbout four minutes on the friction worth fixing. It anchors the working sessions that follow.
Master cutThe full arc for leadership, organized by idea.
Paper editRed flags, documented in a private brief for leadership only. Serious issues never appear in the film.
The footageYours to keep and recut for hiring, onboarding, or the next offsite.
Guardrail

Everyone appears on their own terms. Participants consent on camera, leadership reviews before release, and the hard truths travel in writing, never in the edit.

Why now

A generation raised on video now fills your org chart, and it trusts what it can see. A hope score proves you measured. The film proves you listened.

How we work

Diagnose before you reorg.

Your engagement survey flashed red. Leadership knows something broke. The reflex says restructure. We interrupt the reflex, because a reorg built on a misdiagnosis costs you a year and your best people.

1

Strategy session

Complimentary. One hour with both principals. We spend most of it listening, and you leave with the issue underneath the issue named.

2

Listening tour

Structured listening inside your organization: leadership, frontline, cross-functional friction pairings, and a validation loop back to the top. Cameras roll if you commission the film. You receive a clear diagnosis, prescriptive recommendations, and a menu of next moves.

3

The deeper work

Choose from the menu your diagnosis recommends: a six-week diagnostic that maps your culture completely, a narrative strategy sprint, executive coaching, or systems and journey mapping. Run the plan without us, or keep us in the room while the change happens.

We read your organization from every angle.

Astronomers measure true distance by viewing the same star from two positions. We start there: top down and bottom up, in the same moment. Then we widen the lens. Inside out and outside in. The said and the unsaid. The process people describe and the behavior we observe. Our diagnostic scores three frequencies of organizational health, names the pattern underneath your symptoms, and leads with your latent strength before it names the strain. A diagnosis without hope just documents the damage.

Operating

How work actually moves: decisions, priorities, and the systems people navigate every day.

Relational

How people treat each other: trust, candor, silence, and what happens when someone tells the truth.

Identity

Who the organization believes it has become, and whether the people inside still recognize it.

The self-serve diagnostic arrives here soon. Until then, every diagnosis starts with a conversation.

Case studies

What happens when a team gets its hope back.

Four engagements from twenty years of practice. Each one started with strain and ended with a team that could create, adapt, and tell each other the truth again.

The principals

Her cultural anthropology. His sociology.

DL

Danna Lloyd

Cultural anthropologist and brand strategist

Danna has spent two decades inside Google, Disney, PlayStation, Meta, and TikTok, following the people who build the systems that shape our lives. She has built video insight teams inside major organizations, produced and directed ethnographic film for brands from PayPal to Roblox, and turned what people say, and what they leave unsaid, into brand strategy. She reads organizations from the inside out, and she asks the best questions in any room.

DV

Dale Thomas Vaughn

Sociologist and narrative strategist

Twenty years of executive communications across Microsoft, Google, SAP, Southwest Airlines, and Ticketmaster. Dale's culture programs moved a Microsoft division's Thrive scores from the bottom 25% to first place across Microsoft Cloud, and his listening tours became a signature capability across the company. Author of Birthright: Recall and Wine Snobs Are Boring.

We met at Southwest Airlines twenty years ago and learned the founders' first principle: people support what they help to create. We have listened to leaders together ever since.

We listen to leaders.

One hour. Both principals. We spend most of it listening, and you leave with clarity and a credible reason for hope.

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